Chris

Airwindows is one guy: me! I am an audio hacker and computer programmer from way back. I seek only to continue my life up here in Vermont, inventing things and putting them onto the internet, sometimes for free and sometimes for pay. My hope is that people richer than me (i.e. most people) don't rob me. My other hope is for another cup of Aeropress. One out of two ain't bad!

This plugin is an exploration of a fascinating filter type that, I think, is really underrated. It’s a straight-up extremely simple averaging filter. If you set it to integer values, it exactly averages that number of taps on the input audio (adjacent samples). If you pick in-between values it interpolates, causing the ‘frequency’ of the filter to smoothly blend between the values.

There’s a reason you don’t see this filter used for lowpasses: it’s not technically correct. In fact it whacks a great big cancellation node into the high frequencies, and the tone (while pleasing) is very obviously affected by this. It’s a bit of a flangey quality.

BUT, we know better than to be limited by technical concepts, right? After all, the classic Scream Tracker resonant lowpass is known to be broken, and that has a real character to it. And even the Roland Supersaw is known to have some quirks that make it what it is…

Average has a fantastic tonality once you accept the response quirks. You can dial in the notches to suppress unwanted content, and (in a post-video revision) it’s got a dry-wet control so you can moderate the effect—and, typically for Airwindows, if this dry/wet is set to full wet, the calculations for doing that drop out of the plugin entirely so you’re not doing an unnecessary multiply. And it’s AU, Mac and PC VST and free (because this whole project is supported by Patreon and continuing to grow month by month into a very awesome public service for all plugin users!)